Coronavirus mapped: Which countries around the world has the virus spread to?
The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a map showing which countries have coronavirus cases, as the illness continues to spread around the world.
The interactive map reveals that the virus, which was first identified in China in late December, has now infected people in every permanently-inhabited continent.
Countries which have recorded coronavirus infections are shaded in different colours depending on the number of cases they have experienced.
The worst-affected countries, which are shown in dark red, are China, Japan, South Korea, Iran and Italy.
Nations with the fewest recorded cases, such as Spain and the Russian Federation, which both have two cases to date, are shaded in pink.
Other countries, like the US and Australia which have 59 and 22 confirmed cases respectively, appear in colours between pink and dark red depending on the number of people infected.
Viewers can also see the break-down of numbers for each particular country.
The map was published shortly after the US warned that a pandemic was likely.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told Americans to prepare themselves for this eventuality, even though the immediate risk in the country remains low.
Anne Schuchat, the CDC's principal deputy director, said on Tuesday: "It's not a question of if. It's a question of when and how many people will be infected.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s chief, however, advised against calling the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.
"We should not be too eager to declare a pandemic without a careful and clear-minded analysis of the facts," Tedros said in Geneva.
"Using the word pandemic carelessly has no tangible benefit, but it does have significant risk in terms of amplifying unnecessary and unjustified fear and stigma, and paralysing systems. It may also signal that we can no longer contain the virus, which is not true,” he added.
On Wednesday, the death toll in China rose to over 2,000 according to Chinese health authorities.
Elsewhere, 19 people have now died in Iran from the virus, making its death toll the highest outside China.
The outbreak in northern Italy has also worsened, and it was confirmed that the illness has spread from there to countries previously unaffected, including Switzerland and Croatia.
Since individual country declarations are not shown on the map until the WHO has verified the statistics, the map may lag slightly behind other updates.
Additional reporting from Reuters
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